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Bats in the Belfry in Phoenixville

Liz emailed me with the horrifying news that a big brown bat came flying into the living room last night while she was watching television. It is in her room now and she sent me a photo. Yikes. But she found a great web site about bats in the northeast and it calmed me down a bit. All she has to do is keep the door closed, open a bedroom window and let it fly out. If it's a mother, which it probably is, it has babies and you can't really do anything until August. I had been keeping the little art storage door open upstairs because my cat Dionysus loves to go in there. I blocked off (I thought) access to the space where he could go way in the back but apparently bats can squeeze into a space as small as 0.5 to 1.25 inches. Now I know why he wanted so much to go in and would scratch at the door and cry. First a dead racoon the last summer I was gone and Liz had to pick it up with a shovel to dispose of it in the back of my property and now while I'm in England, the bat appears which at least is alive but still disconcerting. I love animals but bats in the attic are not what I have in mind. There she is, perched on one of my woodblock prints in the downstairs bedroom. She can leave from an open window in the bedroom and then come back into the house to feed her babies so they don't die and stink up the attic. Hope she is a single Mom. I don't have bats in the belfry, but a bat in the bedroom. Hope it can leave ok and return to its babies.

Little brown bat; Liz says the bat is big and brown but it looked small to me on the picture she took a photo of it resting on my woodblock print of the little German boy holding a doll in the downstairs bedroom.

On a lighter note concerning animals - I went back to the Beatrix Potter small shop and museum (teeny tiny upstairs room with Beatrix Potter DVD playing and kinds of stuffed little mice and infomration aboutth the Tailor of Gloucester. I caved in and bought a few books, my favorite, Tom Kitten and another cat book, The Tale of Three Bad Kittens as well as the Tailor of Gloucester and a magnet for my office magnet collection. Below: current Beatrix Shop/Museum by Glouceter Cathedral and a drawing by Beatrix of the Tailor of Gloucester's shop at the location.

"When the Cathedral clock struck twelve there was an answer - like an echo of the chimes - and Simkin heard it, and came out of the tailor's door, and wandered about in the snow."

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